Tag: Vision

The agile roadmap is often confused with product roadmap or scrum ceremonies. The agile roadmap is indeed much beyond that. If it is not just the scrum activities then the question arises in terms of what is agile roadmap all about? How important is it to know what happens before sprint planning? For most of us, sprint planning is the beginning of agile project while it is not (Practically it can be considered as mid-stage). A lot happen before ‘sprint’ ceremonies. The agile roadmap would probably answer the entire process that is being followed to accomplish the project.

At a very abstract level, the agile roadmap has 7 phases listed as below:-

The product vision talks about – What your product is, and what it entails? How it would support your company or organization strategy and who is going to consume it.

There are many more factors being considered here including the market, complexity, feasibility etc.

Product Roadmap

This phase defines high level of product requirements which are written at high level (EPICs)

The discussion between product owner and other stakeholders enable PO to define

High level estimates (Probably ROM -> +/- 100%).

Priorities

Release Planning

The EPICs are further broken down into individual stories.

An agile project will have multiple releases with the highest priority features being picked up in order.

During this phase release timing for the specific product is determined.

The release plan must have to be created at the beginning of the project.

The number of sprints, team staffing and capacity is being looked at as well.

Sprint Planning

The sprint team works with PO to groom the requirements based on priority.

Technical and product dependencies are discussed.

Individual tasks are created for each requirement. The next level of estimates are created (+/- 20%). Planning poker, relative estimate, and WBD are quite commonly used to provide an estimation. Based on the maturity or project and organization in the specific area, complexity based estimation can be utilized as well.

The team gives commitment by looking at the capacity and next level of estimates.

This happens at the end of the sprint. All the stakeholders sit together and discuss

Things which worked well

Areas for Improvement or things which we should stop doing it

Action Items

This meeting should also look at the action items of the previous retrospective and see where we stand. If the previous action items are not addressed, those should be included in current retrospective.

Many times the first three phases are ignored by agile teams. The ultimate success requires or expects that the entire agile team to be well versed with first 3 phases as well. They should be part of it from day one.